Practice Of Close Reading Research Articles

The Try Guys: Making Their Brand Through Direct Address and Cancellation With Feelings

The Try Guys’ “what happened” video, which appears on their YouTube channel, narrates their cancellation of colleague Ned Fulmer because of an extra-marital relationship with an employee. Some literature suggests that cancel culture offers disempowered individuals and groups methods of identifying and correcting hateful practices. However, I employ the humanities practice of close reading to demonstrate how emotional cancel practices can elide intolerant systems and sustain norms. I analyze The Try Guys’ content, reportage about the group, and YouTube. As I argue, The Try Guys’ claims about enacting an ethical cancellation displace their reliance on “humorously” sexualizing women’s bodies and mocking femininity in videos about incongruously wearing women’s clothing. I also elaborate on direct address literature as a method of articulating cancel culture’s “direct addresses with feelings,” how The Try Guys use the cancellation to render the brand and connect with fans, and how my analysis contributes to related scholarship.

What is close reading? An exploration of a methodology

ABSTRACT What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness. Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author’s close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions.

Digital Close Reading for Lower Primary Students

AbstractHow can primary literacy teachers effectively identify, adapt, and incorporate developmentally appropriate technologies to support their students' reading development? This article reports results from a case study attempting to digitize a classroom literacy practice—close reading—for Year 2 students. It suggests that digital tools can effectively support close reading practices and students' literacy learning. Results also identify some unique affordances that digitization offers. The author provides suggestions and tips for practitioners interested in incorporating technology into their regular close reading routines.

Reading with love: the potential of critical posthuman reading practices in preservice English education

PurposePreservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.Design/methodology/approachIn “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.FindingsThis study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.Originality/valueThe authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.

Relationality, community and collaboration in seventeenth-century Chancery court records

ABSTRACT This article adds significantly to the literature on the value of Chancery court documents, depositions in particular, demonstrating their worth as a source of information about early modern community relations, and collective and individual identity. Through a detailed reading of one particular late seventeenth-century case, it argues that depositions should be viewed as collaborations between plaintiffs, defendants, legal counsel and deponents. These sources are framed as communally produced and as the results of collaborations between multiple members of various overlapping community circles. Using the concept of relationality, as it is defined and deployed by scholars of life writing who note that virtually all autobiographical acts involve biographies of others, the article casts new light on the ways in which subjectivities were formed by individuals’ positions in relation to others. When applied to Chancery documents, close reading practices allow us to speculatively recreate the communities from which depositions and pleadings arose and to identify instances of contextualised self-construction within deponents’ representations of themselves, others, and those communities.

Writing (as) Refusal

Writing (as) Refusal

The Rhetoric of Narcissism: Trump's Tweets on Writing

Abstract Donald Trump's tweets on writing, whether his own or the print media's, typically employ an extreme form of rhetoric involving the manipulation of meaning and construction of self-serving arguments. The practice of close reading suggests that these tweets often display several types of rhetorical operation, which distort the message through the amalgamation, expansion, contraction, and reversal of meaning to create expressions like “the Fake News.” These polysemous expressions are then combined to form word groups, all centered on the self but each designed to meet a particular narcissistic need, from self-promotion and self-proclaimed victory to self-defense and self-casting as the Messiah. Trump's tweets often take the form of a triangular configuration, composed of the writer to proclaim, an adversary to be conquered, and a witness to validate the victory. By putting at least two of the three actors into play within its reduced space, the tweet becomes a miniature psychodrama—scripted, cast, and staged by the narcissist for an audience of kindred spirit.

#FreeBritney and the Pleasures of Conspiracy

#FreeBritney and the Pleasures of Conspiracy

Translation Pedagogy in the Comparative Literature Classroom: Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Model of Translation

This paper considers how an increased awareness of translation in the language classroom might impact the instruction of Comparative Literature, and literary studies more broadly. Despite the arguments for translation’s centrality to the study Comparative Literature (Apter, 2006; Bassnett, 2006; Newman 2017) translation pedagogy is still under-studied and under-practiced in the Comparative Literature classroom. Among Comparative Literature instructors, close reading is often given pride of place, an emphasis echoed in commonly-assigned textbooks such as Writing Analytically (Rosenwasser and Stephen, 2014). Yet the practice of close reading is arguably one of the most challenging concepts for beginning literature students to master, in part due to the resistance of some instructors and other literary professionals in modeling how to close read a translated text (Venuti, 2004; 2017). By outlining specific lessons, this article shows how employing a hermeneutic translation model (Steiner, 1975; Venuti, 2017; 2019; Laviosa 2019) in the literature classroom can help literature students conceptualize this central building block of literary studies. The article closes with a discussion of some of the ways in which a greater awareness of Translation Studies in the Comparative Literature classroom could unite theory with practice. 

Hamnet in the NICU.

Hamnet in the NICU.

Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century

Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century Stephanie M. Hilger The academic separation of the sciences and the humanities makes it difficult to explore the connection between the various aspects of the human condition, not least in the discipline of medicine. Even though medicine is not a hard science per se but an interpretive approach that combines scientific and humanities-based modes of knowledge and therefore also experiences what Catherine Belling has called the "hermeneutic anxiety" that informs humanities research,1 it is firmly located among other science buildings whose literal and figurative gates are jealously guarded. The current academic focus on evidence-based medicine further increases the distance between medicine and humanities-based approaches to the human body by implying that the humanities do not produce real evidence. At the same time, calls for narrowing this distance are intensifying. Reestablishing the connection between the humanities and the sciences has become more important than ever because of global processes of corporatization that affect both health care institutions and universities. Cost efficiency in medical education has made it increasingly difficult to offer courses that focus on the human aspect of medicine within the medical curriculum itself. At the same time, the perceived crisis in the humanities has encouraged literary scholars to emphasize that their work is not a self-referential field of inquiry but that it engages broad social and political processes. As a result of the convergence of these two trends, the need for interdisciplinary spaces in teaching and research has grown over the past years. The most forceful calls for bridging disciplinary divides already occurred in the 1970s, when the practice of "literature and medicine" gained ground as a reaction to the transformation of medical schools into high-powered research centers in the previous decade. As Anne Hudson Jones outlines, Edmund Pellegrino called upon medical educators to refocus their attention on the moral dimension of medicine.2 At the same time, Joanne Trautmann Banks highlighted the necessity of "read[ing], in the fullest sense" in order to increase medical practitioners' "tolerance for ambiguity" with the goal of improving patient care.3 With the establishment of the journal Literature and Medicine in 1982, these interdisciplinary endeavors found a home. The name of the journal reflected the reality that the majority of these interdisciplinary ventures originated in literature departments. In addition, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, is perhaps the most "humanistic" of all [End Page 301] humanities disciplines because it is often considered a production of art for art's sake. However, the contributors to the first issues of the journal demonstrated the exact opposite of this common notion. In fact, Rita Charon vehemently opposed an instrumentalization of literature that provided medical doctors merely with "a civilizing veneer" by arguing that writing a poem or quoting a philosopher does not necessarily make a better doctor.4 Many of the early scholars working in the field focused on the textual features not only of literature but also of other types of discourse, including medical texts. One incarnation of this practice is Rita Charon's concept of "narrative medicine," which puts medical practitioners face to face with the textuality of their patients' experiences. These close reading practices were geared at simultaneously uncovering the textual dimension of medical discourse and demonstrating that literature does not constitute a self-referential aesthetic discourse but a powerful vehicle for social commentary. Gradually, the designation "literature and medicine" became limiting in view of other humanities-based approaches to medicine such as history, philosophy, and theology, which do not necessarily focus on medicine's narrative dimension. As a result, the designation "medical humanities" began to be used with increasing frequency. The founding of journals such as Medical Humanities, published by the Institute of Medical Ethics in the UK (2000), and the Journal of Medical Humanities, based in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado (1981),5 signaled the expansion of the field and its increasing academic institutionalization. More recently, as Paul Crawford has observed, "medical humanities" has been replaced by "health humanities" to encompass not only the full range of disciplines involved in the delivery of healthcare but also the patients themselves.6...

Terrestrial Humanism and the Weight of World Literature: Reading Esi Edugyan’sWashington Black

Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel,Washington Black(2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves.

The Modern Times of José Rivas Panedas’s Ultraísmo

This essay studies select poems by the Spanish ultraísta José Rivas Panedas to offer a new perspective on the avant-garde and its raison d’être. Though the rural elements in some of Rivas’s texts might seem foreign to the most radical avant-garde’s technophilic renewal project, I argue that Rivas’s fascination with both the cosmopolitan café and with roosters at daybreak is evidence of the avant-garde’s constitutive paradox, a temporal paradox. In doing so, I defend a renewed practice of close reading with reference to recent critics of the methodology of literary studies like Franco Moretti and Rita Felski.

Teaching to Resist, Teaching to Recover: Charlotte Forten’s Sea Islands Archives across Private and Public Forms

Teaching to Resist, Teaching to Recover: Charlotte Forten’s Sea Islands Archives across Private and Public Forms Mollie Barnes In my second summer at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, I read Charlotte Forten’s Civil War journals with my students in “Abolitionism in the Sea Islands,” a course I designed about social-reform literature from our region. We followed this up by reading “Life on the Sea Islands,” a two-part series Forten published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. I wanted my students to study private and public versions of these entries. The first documented the perspective of a teacher who traveled from Salem to Port Royal Sound in the midst of the Civil War. The second compressed this immediate experience for a national audience at the moment when she returned home. We were intrigued with permutations of certain passages that Forten copies—sometimes almost word for word, but in abbreviated and reorganized narrative contexts—as she transforms her journals into articles. Her iterations are striking. My students’ curiosity about her exacting revisions sparked my own as a teacher and scholar. After the course ended, I traced Forten’s revisions, comparing the journals with pieces published, at varying intervals, in the Boston Evening Transcript (1862), the Salem Register (1862), the Liberator (1862), the Atlantic Monthly (1864), and Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book (1865).1 These comparisons dramatized her most provocative activist-revisionist editorial strategies. In fact, the relationships among these versions—and among the texts she cites within these texts—illuminate the potential for her nineteenth-century prose to enact powerful literary recoveries that blur traditional boundaries between “private” and “public” texts and contexts. In this essay I argue that we ought to read Forten’s private and public records of her experiences at the Penn School in South Carolina together as her “Sea Islands archives.” While previous scholarship has read Forten’s journals [End Page 235] as drafts of privately and publicly circulated letters and articles addressed to friends in newspapers and literary magazines, I argue that the boundaries between her private and her public writing, and its circulation and publication histories, are far more complicated.2 Instead of interpreting her journals as drafts of her newspaper articles (in terms of linear circulation and publication histories), we ought to read these texts together, side by side, as interconnected and intersecting pieces in her Sea Islands archives. In this way, we can read the journals not as drafts but as a textual nexus through which we are able to recover the backstories of letters, articles in periodicals, and her own literary recoveries that might otherwise remain illegible if we read only the “private” or the public versions—or we read one as primary to the other. The recoveries and archival strategies we can trace across Forten’s public and private forms are intertwined, however different the contexts of the journals and the periodicals where she published may be, since the writing is, in part, a patchwork of shared sentences/paragraphs. In this essay, I read Forten’s journals as the center of a network of Sea Islands letters and articles that illuminates the ways she was self-consciously doing—and documenting—important textual recovery work as a teacher at the Penn School: not only revising and circulating her stories about teaching but also recording the complex private and public networks that published this material. As I will demonstrate, studying Forten’s Sea Islands archives in this way invites us to reframe our close-reading practices and engage them in broader conversations about nineteenth-century periodical print culture. When we study Forten’s texts together, we can also study how she positions teaching and editing as strategic acts of resistance and recovery. I do this, first, by studying John Brown’s recursive appearances in her public and private writing. “John Brown’s Body” punctuates Forten’s journals. This Civil War anthem is one of the first things she teaches her students, who sing it with her, again and again, on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, when the Emancipation Proclamation was read under Beaufort’s Emancipation Oak. Next, I unpack other textual circulations and...

ODBRANA POEZIJE: RUSKI FORMALIZAM I NOVA KRITIKA

The paper aims to present the key concepts that two formalist schools of thought developed in order to defend poetry as a miracle of communication. Russian Formalism takes Shklovsky’s defamiliarization (остранение) as its key concept and the trans-sense language (zaum) of Russian Futurist poets as a basis for analysing what constitutes differentia specifica of poetry. The ideas of the Russian formalist school, through Roman Jakobson, spread first to Eastern Europe, and then to the United States of America, where they influenced a group of critics, who were already inspired by T. S. Eliot’s and I. A. Richards’ ideas on poetic language and communication, to develop a new critical methodology. The name “New Criticism” was supposed to indicate that this school of thought was about different approaches and new tendencies in criticism. As the paper demonstrates, the key representatives of New Criticism are particularly interested in exploring the function of poetry and of criticism as well as the nature of poetic imagination and language. In order to examine what the poem says as a poem, they developed the practice of close reading and focused on metaphor, paradox, and specific method by which a poet transforms his experience into a poem as autonomous features of poetic expression. The special terminology introduced by Russian Formalism and New Criticism, and the complex, ironic and intellectual language they used not only managed to throw light on what specific problems of the science of literature were, but also enabled a defence through poetry – a kind of resuscitation and refinement of non-literary reality.

From the Library to the Lab: Close Reading Rabbits as a Cross-Disciplinary Experiment

This article situates the practice of close reading within a cross-disciplinary context that moves beyond literary criticism and linguistic analysis to sociology and the history of science. A comparative approach to the practice of close reading adds to the toolbox of literary critics, who often focus on meaning rather than material. After a review of close reading from a literary point of view, I introduce Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) concept of microprocessing and Rheinberger’s (1997) concept of pragmatogony as equally valid forms of close reading from the disciplines of sociology and history of science. If a combination of these techniques can be applied to literary works, literary critics can analyze the epistemic value of literature, which requires experimentation with the material of a literary artefact, which in turn affects the author and critic. Through examples of engaging literary material in addition to representations, literary critics can experiment with and redefine the literary object as an epistemic object and the practice of close reading as undefined at the time of creation and interpretation. By way of metaphors and folklore about rabbits, a novel with a white rabbit, and genetically modified rabbits, this article offers three conclusions that appear when the practices of microprocessing and pragmatogony are applied to literary works. The reconceptualization of the practice of close reading, 1) transforms the author and reader into hybrid scientists-artists, rather than prophets, geniuses, or intellectuals; 2) transforms the literary object of study from a book to any material object; and 3) transports the practice of close reading from the library to the laboratory.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+346.

<i>Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion</i>. Edited by Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+346.

Exploring classroom discourse in the Common Core era: a multiple case study

ABSTRACTThe Common Core State Standards shifted comprehension instruction to an analytic process commonly referred to as close reading. This multiple case study explored the academic discourse strategies of teachers and readers as they engaged in the practice of close reading. Framed by the Representation of Dialogue in a Joint Activity System, analysis suggested that educators embraced high-level questioning but neglected teaching readers how to examine texts flexibly through multiple perspectives. Additionally, like their teachers, readers had a rich questioning repertoire, but constructed meaning through a consensual but not exploratory process. The results of this study show promise in teacher questioning styles and illustrate the symbiotic nature of teacher and learner discourse styles. Moreover, findings add to the literature surrounding the complexities of classroom discourse.

Whitman’s Metro-Poetic Lettrism: The Mannahatta Skyline as Sentence, Syntax, and Spell

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,Whereupon, lo! Up sprang the aboriginal name!I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,with tall and wonderful spires....-Mannahatta11In his 1860 poem Mannahatta, Walt Whitman hints at just how microscopic our academic practice of close reading could eventually become. Whitman's poem reads its own title word's letterscape as a skyline, with its vowels compared to saliva-storing water-bays and its consonants compared to ascending spires. The poet finds meaning burrowed inside a borough's name, but also scrolled out along the surface of its spelling. This paper is a series of aphoristic riffs following his own example off the rooftops of its most extreme implications, treating this fleeting and oblique reference as a kind of high-rise Rosetta Stone or a runic cipher into Whitman's philological concerns.Whitman, unlike thinkers from Plato to Saussure, believed in a sensual correspondence not only between objects and their names, but also between words and their component letters. The Native American word Mannahatta treated like a skyline is a case of signifier-become-signified, characters-become-content, and a horizon-made-hieroglyphic, proof indeed that These States shall stand rooted in the ground in names.2 David Carr refers to the Manhattan skyline and its hourglass undulation as a sexy colossus in Reubenesque recline,3 but Whitman sees the pre-colossal 1860 skyline as a spelling primer and a conjurer's spell at once. While my reference is anachronistic, Alphabet City here is not a specific Lower East Side enclave but, for Whitman, the elongated entirety of Manhattan itself.Clearly, Whitman's background as a printer's apprentice and a journeyman carpenter gives him a mechanical and architectural feeling for the humanly made shapes of characters and words. Whitman (who blurred between subject and object by writing his own nameless reviews for of Grass) is a word-carpenter and a self-made fetish constructed out of words at once. In Song of the Broad-Axe, one of his odes-to-tools, he uses the word to describe the jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising4 of a building, just as his assembling-together of letters on a compositor's stick was preparatory to the laying-down of words on a page, a process blueprinted by Whitman's handwritten manuscripts. By implication, the crossbars, ascenders, and serifs of letters are the beam, studs, tenons, and mortises of our words, and considering his abundant references to house-making tools (and the ways that exclamation points often cluster around those tool-references), Whitman's mere pen seems often to envy the majestic blows of hammers and chisels and mallets.2Mannahatta imagines a word made out of iron, rivets, and cement, but the letters making up the words Leaves of Grass on that book's first cover were entwined in vines, buds, and ivy-tendrils, in a biomorphic ensemble that announced its main vegetable motif, a topos that is rooted in a complex of Romance-language puns. The French word for book (livre) indeed derives (linguistically and organically) from a tree's living portion (its liber). In one anthropological model, the initial letters stamped on clay tablets were symbolic of grasses like wheat, barley and related mercantile produce-grass was among our earliest pictograms. Whitman is tapping into an organicist tradition here but also serving (by focusing on the architectonics of the alphabet) as a precursor to a more meta-discursive tradition to come, and hence serving as an inter-generational pivot and joist.In Thoreau's sandbank scene from Walden, letters and words emerge in the shapes formed by the thawing clay of a railroad embankment, as items of organic telos, but Whitman sees letters and words as humanly formed constructions, both arbitrarily iconic and yet elementally essential at once. …

Tempo(e)rality

Tempo(e)rality